Nestable and stackable baskets are commonly used in the baking industry for transporting bakery products to retail stores. In loading operations, single baskets are filled with identical product, such as bread, cakes or buns. A number of filled baskets are manually and evenly stacked on top of each other by bakery loaders and loaded into trucks.
Since bakery products come in several different thicknesses or heights, it is known in the baking industry to utilize baskets having features enabling stacking on each other at different stacking heights, depending upon the profile of products in each basket. This protects the contents and reduces shipping costs.
These multi-level stacking baskets are of generally rectangular configuration and typically include end walls and side walls formed with stacking saddles and stacking feet. Nesting stop surfaces are formed in the saddles at different heights to receive corresponding stacking support surfaces on the stacking feet. Vertical in-line nesting of two baskets at a particular height is achieved by placing one basket on another basket so the upwardly facing support surfaces of the lower basket engage the downwardly facing stop surfaces of the upper basket.
A frequently recurring problem with such baskets is that different orientation of one basket with respect to another basket is often required to vary the stacking height, resulting in increased handling of the baskets and greater shipping costs. Also, during manual handling, the bakery loader may misorient the basket being stacked, resulting in an unstable stacked structure that can easily topple, or result in crushed bakery goods.
Since bakery goods are staple products that are rapidly sold, it is often undesirable to manually unload the contents of each basket onto store shelves after delivery. Unfortunately, commercially available baskets usually do not include features enabling stacking in vertically offset relation for display and sale purposes.